the eric update – day 29: more postcards! and blue moon birthdays?

i like the fact that the most exciting thing to report today was that we got a bunch more postcards in the mail! woohooo! and my family should be ashamed for allowing complete strangers from all over the world to get eric’s postcard in the mail before they did ( actually my sister candy did get her postcard in the mail fast, but not faster than somebody in santa clarita, california ). thanks again ( and i’m just kidding about the family comments. maybe. 🙂 ) – perhaps the next two and a half months can simply be daily shots of his new postcards. perhaps i can find a way to help you all visualize where they are coming from, with a webified map of the world and a link to a scan of the postcard. see, isn’t that much more interesting than knowing that eric is doing so great that they’re going to experiment with putting him on the nasal cannula all day today? i don’t suspect that he’ll be off the cpap forever, but he does enjoy proving everyone wrong, so who knows.

it occured to me today that some of you might consider august 4th to be his one month “birthday”, at which point i thought it was funny that kris and i both consider yesterday to be his one month birthday, since it was 4 weeks after all and with micropreems gestational milestones are often measured in weeks ( 32 weeks for a suckling reflex, etc ), so it’s just easier to keep a record of weeks, rather than gregorian months; and that’s why we’re going to make it difficult on everyone and keep following a lunar calendar month instead of a “regular” calendar month.

curously, as we were talking about moons, lunar calendars and marking off gestational ages ( of course, you all know that the menstrual cycle is a 28 day cycle too), both of us remembered that it was a full moon yesterday. or something quite close to a full moon. which means it was a full moon on the fourth of july! and, of course, it’ll be a full moon in 28 more days on his second month birthday. neat. i wonder if there’s a link between preeclampsia and full moons joking. mostly. sort-of.. you’d think that he’d also have a full moon on his first “real” birthday, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, if the lunar calendar i linked to is to be trusted.

conspiracy theorists might think we planned this all out ahead of time, given that the full moon features so prominantly in the norse creation myths ( i’d guess that the full moon probably is a common thing to talk about in all creation myths ) and that we decided to call him odin. but remember, i’m an adherent to littleton’s law and the power of a good story. most of the time.

in any case, eric’s monthly “birthdays” will henceforth be officially observed every 28 days until further notice ( at least until we stop paying such close attention to weeks and “age adjusted” milestones ), so double check and make sure we’re celebrating on the same day!

update: some good news and some not-so-good-news-that-isn’t-horrible. first, eric is packing on the weight. he gained more than two ounces today and weighed in at 1 pound 15.3 ounces! amazing! he will most assuredly hit the two pound milestone in the next day or so. w00t!

also, he did have to go back on cpap this evening and the nurses noticed that one of his lungs sounded like it was not expanding and contracting as it should be; they weren’t overly concerned about it, but they are going to give him a chest x-ray tommorrow to make sure there isn’t anything bad happening. there are innumerable, innocent reasons for why his lung might not be acting as it should, and a couple of bad reasons that they want to rule out. so we’ll be hoping for the best over the next 24 hours.

there’s also a small chance that he might be developing a hernia. or maybe his testicle is descending ( i’m not kidding, they really can’t tell it’s a hernia or a descending testicle). a hernia would be not-so-good since he would need surgery which would necessitate him getting transferred to a different facility in town. and we really like his current nicu, so hopefully it’s not a hernia.

aaaaaaaand. on our nightly dog walk, we were telling the “full moon” story to a neighbor and they commented that they thought that the recent full moon was a “blue moon”! however, upon futher investigation, it looks like eric’s “lunar birthday” is just shy of the full moon, blue moon or otherwise. so conspiracy theorists can rest easy.

Conflux :: A Confluence of Curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex